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Though he had Confalonieri, Benelli and many of the 85 non-Italians behind him, the new Pope was clearly not the Curial candidate. Said one official: "He was one of those Cardinals who always kept his distance from Rome, and he is virtually an unknown quantity in the Curia."
And elsewhere. Those who quickly asserted that Luciani would be a conservative as Pope, one of his former aides cautioned, should know that he left Venice for Rome intending to vote for the president of the Latin American bishops' conference, Aloisio Lorscheider, an outspoken advocate of social justice.
Luciani has a reputation as a pastor quick to pardon carnal sins, but not those of the spirit, and is particularly severe with those in positions of responsibility who openly question church teachings. "Those who treat theology as a human science rather than a sacred science, or exaggerate their freedom," he wrote in the Vatican daily in 1974, "lack faith."
Having long been a catechist and a teacher of theology, Luciani now assumes the primary teaching office in Roman Catholicism. The dissent against dogma from within the church that anguished his predecessor produced insistent demands for yet more change from the left and cries for discipline from the right. It is just possible that when the Cardinals so swiftly cast their two-thirds-plus-one majority for Albino Luciani, this problem was paramount.
In the scenic Argordo Valley of Northeast Italy, home region of the new Pope, church bells pealed in triumph to announce the election, as they had in Rome and round the world. At Belluno, the regional capital where he was a religion teacher, people rushed into the streets as the news broke. Said his brother Edoardo, a retired professor who lives in Canale, a town of 1,500: "I really did not expect that Albino could have been elected Pope. I am confused, moved. I can't say anything else. It's too great, so unexpected." Brother Edoardo spoke for legions, in urbe et orbe.
* According to a French gibe, Pius packed the Vatican with fellow Venetians: "De la barque de St. Pierre Us out fait une gondole " (They've made the barque of St. Peter into a gondola).